thestar.com
Save the Children estimates that close to 1,300 of the 22,507 migrants who have arrived in Italy this year are unaccompanied minors.
Alessandra Tarantino / The Associated Press
A rescuer cradles a child in the Sicilian harbour of Pozzallo,
Italy, early Monday. About 100 migrants, including 28 children, were
rescued on Sunday by a merchant vessel in the Sicilian Strait while they
were trying to cross.
Berhane was beaten, starved, locked up and
forced to witness horrific atrocities in his desperate journey across
Libya to the Mediterranean Sea and Italy with some of the world’s most
brutal smugglers.
But the 17-year-old Eritrean youth was one of the lucky ones — he made it. Unlike the hundreds of would-be migrants who have perished in the past month, and the thousands who have died in recent years, he reached the Italian shore alive.
“We don’t know how many children have died in these attempts,” said Sarah Tyler of Save the Children,
in an interview from the port of Catania in Sicily, where a handful of
survivors were taken after the capsizing of a boat carrying up to 900
people.
“I’ve been doing emergencies for about nine years now,” she said, “and these are some of the worst stories I’ve ever heard.”
Save the Children estimates that close to
1,300 of the 22,507 migrants who have arrived in Italy this year are
unaccompanied minors, many of them from Eritrea, Somalia and Gambia, as
well as strife-torn Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, Afghanistan and the
Palestinian Territories.
The sheer horror of Berhane’s plight took hold
when the unaccompanied teen travelled through the Libyan desert with
about 30 others on a pickup truck driven by cocaine-fuelled smugglers.
“When the truck stopped for a break, if you
did something they didn’t like, you paid dearly,” he told Save the
Children workers in Italy. “I saw them spray people with petrol and set
fire to them until they died.”
In Libya he was starved and beaten with iron
bars on a month-long stopover near Benghazi. On the road to Tripoli,
where Islamists had seized territory, he saw bodies of up to 63 people,
25 of them beheaded.
Alessandra Tarantino/The Associated Press
A migrant is helped disembark in the Sicilian harbour of Pozzallo, Italy, early Monday.
To extort more money the smugglers forced the
migrants to phone their homes, beating them so their relatives could
hear them scream.
“It’s a very organized network,”
said Tyler. “People are passed from one group to another. When they get
to Libya they’re sometimes kidnapped by other smugglers and have to pay
more.”
The stories of violence in Libya are some of
the worst, she added. “Children told us they were put in cells, raped
and tortured. One young boy from Somalia who was 15 saw someone raped,
and then she committed suicide because of the shame.”
Even babies have suffered and died. They were
among 23 burn victims taken to Lampedusa in life-threatening condition
after rescue at sea on Friday. They were in a cooking gas explosion in
Libya before the voyage, and forced into a boat without treatment.
“There was a mother of a 15-month-old baby
whose (head) was completely bandaged, her arm was bandaged and she could
barely eat. She tried to cry, but couldn’t make a sound,” said Tyler.
Her mother had gone without treatment for four
days, she added, and without water for two days. “It was basically a
death sentence. The smugglers treat them as cargo. It doesn’t matter if
they live or die.”
Another woman gravely injured in the same
explosion gave birth to a premature baby who died, before being loaded
into the dilapidated boat.
Berhane is hoping his luck will hold. Taken to
Palermo after an earlier rescue at sea, he is being transferred to a
facility for minors in Sicily. “He hopes to go on to a new life in
northern Europe (and) leave behind him all the viciousness and
inhumanity he has witnessed,” said Save the Children.
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